2006 Rescue & Release

"Zorro"

This is Zorro, the female Eastern Red Bat, her face: tiny eyes, larger ears, a good sized mouth are all trained for finding and eating insects, especially mosquitoes!

In these pictures, you can easily see Zorro's reddish furred body with black, collapsed wings and backward bending knees and tiny claws. Baby bats' claws are so sharp they can hang on the imperfections of a light bulb.

All bats are pest controllers, planters and pollinators and the only nighttime predator of flying insects including mosquitoes and many crop pests.

Eastern Red Bats are a medium-sized reddish, nocturnal, solitary bat with poor eyesight, that spends the day sleeping, hanging like leaves from tree limbs, they do not care for caves or tunnels. Males are orange-red and females are chestnut colored and are one of the few bats that has more than two teats. Eastern Red Bats need four teats for their litter of 3-4 blind pups usually born in June.

Using echolocation, bats forage over fields and water in early evenings and swoop for insects around lights after dark, consuming up to half their weight each night. With its larynx, a sonar-equipped bat makes short pulses of very high-frequency sound. With its nose and mouth, it may channel the wave pulses into a broad beam of sound. Bats use their extremely sensitive ears to detect sound. When a bat sends its sonar signal, its ear canal closes as pulses are produced then opens to receive the echo.

Bats usually catch prey in their mouths, but sometimes use the skin flap between their legs for snagging, and occasionally will land to capture bugs. Twilight-flying insects such as moths, beetles, leafhoppers, flying ants and mosquitoes are among Zorro's favorite foods.

Based on knowledge of roosting and feeding behavior, the Eastern Red Bat ranks among a farmer's best friends. Where feasible, it would make sense to foster hedgerow roosting habitat along crop borders and to carefully consider how pesticides are used. Furthermore, forestry practices that employ controlled burning need to be planned to minimize mortality in areas where red bats are known to hibernate in leaf litter.

An Eastern Red Bat has a maximum life span of 12 years and is migratory: moving northward in the spring and southward in fall.